Modifying virtual persistent volumes based on analysis of performance metrics

ABSTRACT

Example implementations relate to virtual persistent volumes. In an example, a storage virtualization system receives performance metrics related to usage of a virtual persistent volume by a containerized application. The performance metrics are identified in an application data store profile, and the application data store profile is identified based on an application manifest of the containerized application. The virtual persistent volume is modified based on an analysis of the performance metrics.

BACKGROUND

Containers are a type of virtualization. A container may include an application packaged together with dependencies and libraries. A containerized application may use or generate persistent data.

BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF THE DRAWINGS

Various examples will be described below with reference to the following figures.

FIG. 1 depicts an example system that creates a virtual persistent volume that aggregates a plurality of different underlying storage and is presented to a containerized application,

FIG. 2 depicts an example system that modifies a virtual persistent volume based on performance metrics related to usage of the virtual persistent volume.

FIG. 3 depicts an example method that includes modifying a virtual persistent volume based on performance metrics related to usage of the virtual persistent volume.

FIG. 4 depicts an example method that includes analyzing performance metrics to identify a storage class and provisioning new underlying storage volume using the identified storage class.

FIG. 5 depicts an example system with a machine readable medium that includes instructions to modify a virtual persistent volume based on performance metrics related to usage of the virtual persistent volume.

DETAILED DESCRIPTION

Container technology is a computing virtualization paradigm where an application is packaged together with dependencies and libraries in a container to provide an isolated environment for running the application. Such an application may be referred to as a containerized application. Many containers can run on top of a single operating system, but each container is inherently isolated from other containers. In this manner, the container paradigm may be understood to virtualize the operating system. Containers may be more lightweight than other forms of virtualization such as virtual machines, which virtualize hardware. For example, each virtual machine may have its own copy of an operating system kernel, while by contrast, multiple containers may share an operating system kernel.

Containerized applications may need storage to retain persistent data. Container orchestrators (such as Kubernetes) may provide the capability of provisioning some storage for a container. However, many types of storage exist, including but not limited to storage that is local to the container, remote to the container, hardware (e.g., locally attached drive), software-defined (e.g., a file system, virtualized or containerized storage, storage presented via an API, etc.), or storage having a combination of the foregoing aspects. Prior efforts at provisioning container storage may fail to provide the levels of storage configuration flexibility and data services that users and administrators of container environments desire. For example, a container orchestrator may be limited to provisioning one type of storage for an application. Other types of systems may attempt to concatenate multiple volumes together into a single volume, but such concatenation may not have the flexibility to provide certain data services without disrupting user access to the data.

To address challenges and provide flexible and robust container-accessible persistent storage, examples described herein relate to a storage virtualization system and a policy engine thereof that can create a virtual persistent volume that aggregates a plurality of different underlying storage volumes that may be provisioned from different types of storage systems available in a container environment. The virtual persistent volume may take the form of a hierarchical structure, such as a Merkle tree, that relates data objects of the containerized application by their content-based signatures up to a root object.

After initial creation of the virtual persistent volume, the storage-related performance needs of a containerized application may change, such as in instances of increased application load (e.g., increased read or write IOPS (Input/Output Operations per Second), increasing latency, etc.), auto-scaling of the application, or changing nature of the application workload (e.g., shifting from write-oriented to read-oriented operations or vice versa, shifting to archive storage-oriented operations, etc.). In such situations, it would be useful for persistent storage of a containerized application to be automatically optimized in response to the changing storage-related performance needs of the application.

Accordingly, further examples described herein relate to the storage virtualization system monitoring and analyzing performance metrics of the containerized application and/or the storage virtualization system itself (e.g., particularly with respect to a data path component thereof that handles operations of the virtual persistent volume). The storage virtualization system may modify the virtual persistent volume based on the performance metrics. For example, in an implementation, the storage virtualization system may identify a storage class or storage classes available in the container environment that may more optimally fulfill performance requirements of the containerized application determined by an analysis of the performance metrics. The storage virtualization system may then provision one or more new underlying storage volumes from those identified storage classes and modify the virtual persistent volume to include those new underlying storage volumes. By virtue of the foregoing, the storage virtualization system can automatically (e.g., without human intervention) and regularly (e.g., in real-time, near real-time, on a scheduled basis, etc.) optimize performance of a virtual persistent volume to reflect storage requirements of an associated containerized application.

Referring now to the figures, FIG. 1 depicts an example computing system 100 that supports and participates in a container environment 120. The computing system 100 includes a processing resource 102 that may include a microcontroller, a microprocessor, central processing unit core(s), an application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC), a field programmable gate array (FPGA), etc. The computing system 100 includes a machine readable medium 104 that may be non-transitory and include random access memory (RAM), read-only memory (ROM), electrically erasable programmable read-only memory (EEPROM), flash memory, a hard disk drive, etc.

The processing resource 102 may execute instructions 105 (i.e., programming or software code) stored on machine readable medium 104 to perform functions of the computing system 100, such as providing a container orchestrator 122 and a containerized storage system 130, as will be described further below. More particularly, each of the components of the containerized storage virtualization system 130 may be implemented as executable instructions 105, including the data services provider 134, storage virtualizer 136, volume manager 138, adapters 139, policy engine 142, and container storage interface API 144, Containerized applications 124, 126 and container storage interface plug-ins 128 also may be implemented as instructions included in executable instructions 105. Additionally or alternatively, the processing resource 102 may include electronic circuitry for performing the functionality described herein.

The computing system 100 may also include other hardware components, such as physical storage 106. Physical storage 106 may include any physical storage device, such as a hard disk drive, a solid state drive, or the like, or a plurality of such storage devices (e.g., an array of disks), and may be locally attached (i.e., installed) in the computing system 100. In some implementations, physical storage 106 may be accessed as a block storage device.

In some cases, the computing system 100 may also include a local file system 108, which may be implemented as a layer on top of the physical storage 106. For example, an operating system 107 may be executing on the computing system 100 (by virtue of the processing resource 102 executing certain instructions 105 related to the operating system) and the operating system 107 may provide a file system 108 to store data on the physical storage 106.

The computing system 100 may be in communication with other computing systems, such as computing system 110, via a wired and/or wireless network for example. The other computing systems may be similar to the computing system 100, and may each include at least a processing resource and a machine readable medium. The computing systems 100 and 110 may each execute software (i.e., processing resource 102 executes certain instructions 105) to deploy nodes of a container orchestrator 122. In other words, the container orchestrator 122 may have a cluster architecture that includes the container orchestrator nodes of computing systems joined in a cluster. The container orchestrator 122 acts as a platform for deploying and managing containerized applications across the cluster of computing systems. The container orchestrator 122, containerized applications deployed therefrom, and other container resources (such as container storage) are deemed to be within a container environment 120. By contrast, other elements may function outside the container environment 120, such as the local file system 108 and an operating system 107 of the computing system 100.

In FIG. 1 for the purposes of illustration, containerized applications 124 and 126 are deployed via the container orchestrator 122 locally on computing system 100. Thus, it may be said that the applications 124, 126 are remote to other nodes, such as computing system 110. The containerized applications 124, 126 may represent microservices, user applications, or the like, and may sometimes be referred to simply as containers. The container environment 120 may also host containerized applications (not shown) local to other computing systems in the cluster.

The container orchestrator 122 also deploys a containerized storage virtualization system 130, which will be described in more detail below. In the example of FIG. 1, the containerized storage virtualization system 130 is also executing locally on the computing system 100 and processing resource 102 thereof. In some implementations, other containerized storage virtualization systems of other computing systems in the cluster are also included in the container environment 120, although they are not depicted in FIG. 1. For example, the containerized storage virtualization system 130 may serve as a node in a storage virtualization platform having a cluster architecture, where multiple containerized storage virtualization systems (at least some of which may be executing on different and separate physical computing systems) cooperate to store and manage data in a storage virtualization layer.

The container orchestrator 122 may also include a standardized container storage interface 123. The container storage interface 123 has a plug-in architecture and can provision storage in the form of a persistent volume from a storage source using a corresponding one of a plurality of available container storage interface plug-ins 128. To “provision” storage may refer to the process of allocating a certain amount of storage capacity and making that allocation available to a consumer. Plug-ins 128 may be provided by various vendors and may expose (i.e., make available for use and/or consumption) an associated storage system to the container storage interface 123. Non-limiting examples of plug-ins include a block protocol plug-in (e.g., based on Internet Small Computer Systems Interface or iSCSI protocol), a file protocol plug-in (e.g., based on Network File System or NFS protocol, Common Internet File System or CIFS protocol, Server Message Block or SMB protocol), a public cloud persistent volume plug-in, and other plug-ins based on any other storage type (e.g., custom drivers). For convenience, individual ones of the plug-ins 128 may be referred to herein as a plug-in 128 (e.g., a block protocol plug-in 128 or a file protocol plug-in 128). A plug-in 128 may undergo an installation and setup process in the container environment 120 as required for that plug-in (e.g., populating credentials or other configuration details). In some cases, one or more of the plug-ins 128 may be running as a containerized application. However, a persistent volume provisioned through the plug-in 128 may be limited to a single type of storage corresponding to that plug-in. In contrast, the containerized storage virtualization system 130 disclosed herein advantageously may be useful for creating persistent volumes that blend multiple underlying storage types.

The containerized storage virtualization system 130 (also referred to as storage virtualization system 130) runs within one or more containers, and may be implemented in executable instructions 105. As will become evident, the storage virtualization system 130 provides an extra storage virtualization layer between a requesting application and one or more allocations of storage provisioned through the container storage interface 123. The storage virtualization system 130 includes a data path 132 and a control plane 140. The data path 132 includes data services provider 134, storage virtualizer 136, and a volume manager 138. The data path 132 also may include storage adapters 139 for accessing local storage (i.e., storage on the same computing system 100 on which the storage virtualization system 130 is hosted), such as a block adapter for mounting local physical storage 106, stacked file and block adapters for accessing local file system 108 as a block device, or other storage adapters.

The control plane 140 includes a policy engine 142 and a container storage interface API (application programming interface) 144. During an initialization phase of the storage virtualization system 130, the control plane 140 may receive from an administrator or the container orchestrator 122 a list of available container storage interface plug-ins 128 in the container environment 120. The control plane 140 may also acknowledge the storage adapters 139 available to the data path 132 for mounting local storage. The control plane 140 may also maintain a list of characteristics of the storage associated with each of those available plug-ins 128, such as performance characteristics (e.g. latency, lops or Input/Output Operations per Second, etc.), security characteristics (e.g., encryption, isolation, etc.), data protection characteristics (e.g., available RAID, or redundant array of independent disks, levels), cost characteristics (e.g., dollar per GB), or other characteristics.

The functionality of the data path functions 132 and control plane functions 140 will now be described in the context of providing storage to containerized applications 124, 126. A containerized application, such as application 124 may request storage from the container orchestrator 122. For example, the application 124 may need a persistent volume to store data. In some implementations, the application 124 may pass one or more requirements with the request, such as a capacity requirement, a performance requirement (e.g., latency, IOPS, etc.), a data protection requirement (e.g., RAID level), a cost requirement (e.g., dollar per GB), a security requirement, a tiering requirement (e.g., specified amounts of hot and cold storage), or other requirement. In some implementations, the container orchestrator 122 may maintain a storage abstraction called an orchestrator persistent volume in response to the request.

The container orchestrator 122 may use the container storage interface 123 to send the request to the storage virtualization system 130 through the container storage interface API 144 of the control plane 140 (with interface 144 acting as a server). In this manner, containerized storage virtualization system 130 may be understood to act as a storage provider to container orchestrator 122. In some implementations, the control plane 140 may assign an identifier to the request, such that each request can be individually identified, particularly with respect to the storage that will be provisioned for each request in the manner described herein.

The policy engine 142 of the container orchestrator 122 analyzes the request to determine what types of storage meet the requirements of the request. For example, the control plane 140 may have one or more of the following types available for storage provisioning: the physical storage 106, the local file system 108, a remote storage system 160, a virtualized storage 162, or public cloud storage 164. Additionally, more than one of any of the types of storage depicted may exist, but are not shown for clarity of illustration. For example, multiple remote storage 160 may be available from which to provision allocations of storage.

Remote storage system 160 as depicted in FIG. 1 may represent either a file system (e.g., a network-attached storage, or NAS, file server), block storage system (e.g., a storage area network, or SAN, storage device), or any other type of storage system that is remote to the computing system 100 and thus remote to the containerized storage virtualization system 130. For example, being remote may mean that the computing system 100 communicates with the remote storage system 160 via a network connection or the like.

Virtualized storage 162 may represent any existing persistent volume in a virtual environment, such as a persistent volume in the container environment 120 including container storage provisioned through the container storage interface 123 independent of the containerized storage virtualization system 130. In some examples, virtualized storage 162 may represent container storage provisioned by another container storage virtualization system other than system 130 (e.g., hosted on a different node than computing system 100). In some examples, virtualized storage 162 may represent storage provided by a virtual machine or hypervisor based software-defined storage platform.

The policy engine 142 may determine a mix of the foregoing storage types. For example, the policy engine 142 may compare the request to the available storage types to identify a closest match. To illustrate, the request may ask for certain amount of high speed storage and a certain amount of low cost, archival class storage. The policy engine may determine that physical storage 106 meets the high speed storage requirement (e.g., due in part to locality and being a high speed media in this example) and a block storage device 160 meets the low cost, archival class requirements, Additional example implementations of the policy engine 142 are described further herein, with respect to FIG. 2 for example.

Subsequently, the control plane 140 utilizes the adapters 139 and/or container storage interface plug-ins 128 to provision each storage type in the determined mix and to acquire a mount point for each provisioned storage. A mount point allows access to the provisioned storage by a consumer, such as the data path 132 as will be described below.

As an example of local provisioning, the control plane 140 may use a block adapter from the adapters 139 to provision an allocation from physical storage 106 and acquire a local block mount point 170 (e.g., local host device mount point) to access that allocation. As another example, the control plane 140 may use stacked file and block adapters to provision an allocation from the local file system 108 and to acquire a local file system mount point 172 to access that allocation as a block device (i.e. “file as block device”).

To provision storage via the plug-ins 128, the control plane 140 via the container storage interface API 144 communicates with the storage interface 123 to request that a plug-in 128 provision an allocation from its associated storage and provide a mount point back to the control plane 140. As an example, presuming the remote storage system 160 represents a remote block device (e.g., a SAN storage array external to the computing system 100), the control plane 140 may request (via 144 and 123) that a block protocol plug-in 128 (e.g., based on iSCSI protocol) provision an allocation from the block-type remote storage system 160 and provide a remote volume mount point 174 (e.g., iSCSI target and LUN, or Logical Unit Number) to access that allocation. As another example, the remote storage system 160 may represent a remote file device (e.g., a NAS file server), and the control plane 140 may request (via 144 and 123) that a file protocol plug-in 128 (e.g., based on NFS protocol) provision an allocation from the file-type remote storage system 160 and provide a remote volume mount point 174 (e.g., an IP address and export name under NFS) to access that allocation. In some implementations, the control plane 140 may utilize a block protocol plug-in 128 to provision from physical storage 106 or utilize a file protocol plug-in 128 to provision from the local file system 108, instead of using an adapter 139.

As another example of provisioning by way of a plug-in, the control plane 140 may request (via 144 and 123) that a plug-in 128 matching the virtualized storage 162 provision an allocation from the virtualized storage 162 and provide a virtualized storage mount point 176 to access that allocation. As another example, the control plane 140 may request (via 144 and 123) that a public cloud plug-in 128 provision an allocation from the public cloud storage 164. In return, the public cloud plug-in 128 may provide a public cloud persistent volume mount point 178 to access that allocation.

Although FIG. 1 depicts a local block mount point 170, a local file system mount point 172, a remote volume mount point 174, a virtualized storage mount point 176, and a public cloud persistent volume mount point 178, more or fewer mount points and mount points of any combination may be requested by the control plane 140 and acquired via the adapters 139 or plug-ins 128. In various instances, multiple local block mount points 170, multiple local file system mount points 172, multiple remote volume mount points 174, multiple virtualized storage mount points 176, and/or multiple public cloud persistent volume mount points 178 may be requested and acquired by the control plane 140. Moreover, the storage system 160 and the remote mount point 174 may represent respectively one or more of the same or different types of remote storage and a mount point thereof, including block, file, or other types of remotely accessible storage. The particular combination of storage mount points requested and acquired by the control plane 140 may depend on the storage request from the containerized application 124, and more particularly, may depend on the handling of that storage request by the policy engine 142.

Once the one or more storage mount points (e.g., 170, 172, 174, 176, or 178) have been acquired by the control plane 140 in accordance with the policy engine 142, the control plane 140 passes the acquired mount points to the data path 132. The control plane 140 may identify the mount points as being associated with a particular request, by associating the mount points with the request identifier for example. As will be described, the data path 132 consumes and blends (i.e., aggregates) the mount points to create a virtual persistent volume 156 presented by a mount point 180 to the requesting containerized application 124. In this manner, the allocated storage corresponding to the acquired mount points (e.g., 170, 172, 174, 176, or 178) may be referred to as the underlying storage (or similarly, backend storage) of the virtual persistent volume 156. The containerized application 124 thus reads and writes data to the virtual persistent volume 156. Before describing the creation of the virtual persistent volume 156, operational aspects of the data path 132 will first be described.

The data path 132 includes storage virtualizer 136, which maintains an object-based storage virtualization layer 150. A purpose of the storage virtualization layer 150 is to decouple where data is stored (i.e., storage allocations accessed via the mount points 170, 172, 174, 176, and/or 178) from how data is presented to a consumer of the data (e.g., containerized application 124). In this manner, data services such as migration, backup, snapshotting, replication, deduplication, compression, and others, may be performed on any mix of underlying storage and with decreased, minimal, or even no disruption to a consumer of the data.

An aspect of the storage virtualization layer 150 is that the storage virtualizer 136 stores data as “objects” in an object store 152. More particularly, the object store 152 may store different types of objects, including data objects and metadata objects. Data related to the containerized application 124, including files and/or directories, is made up of one or more data objects. Metadata objects may, among other things, be useful for organizing the data objects in a useful and orderly manner, as will be described below. In some implementations, each data object in the object store may be a fixed amount of data, such as 4 or 8 kibibytes of data for example, and metadata objects may also be a fixed amount of data, such as 1 kibibyte.

An object-based storage virtualization layer 150 may be different from block level storage (e.g., implemented in a SAN and presented via a storage protocol such as iSCSI or Fibre Channel) and file level storage (e.g., a file system which manages data in a file hierarchy and is presented via a file level protocol such as NFS or SMB/CIFS), although the object-based storage virtualization layer 150 may underlie block or file level storage protocols (e.g., by abstraction via mount points 180, 182 as will be described).

The storage virtualizer 136 maintains an object index 154, which tracks, for each object (data object and metadata object) in the object store 152, a signature, a physical address, and a reference counter. The signature of an object may be a cryptographic digest of the content of that object, using a hash function such as SHA-1, SHA-256, MD5, etc. Thus, the signature may also be referred to as a content-based signature. The reference counter in the object index 154 refers to the number of times the associated object is referenced across all the virtual persistent volumes (including 156, 158) in the storage virtualization layer 150.

The physical address in the object index 154 refers to the actual physical location of the object. In some examples, while the object store 152 may be understood to be a storage construct for describing the storage of objects within the storage virtualization layer 150, it may also be understood that the objects are stored physically on the underlying storage at the physical address. Because the data path 132 can consume multiple storage mount points, the particular mount point may be a part of the physical address. Additionally, the physical address may include a location within the storage allocation of a given mount point. For example, if the mount point pertains to physical storage 106, the physical address may include a logical block number. If the mount point pertains to public cloud storage 164, the physical address may include a reference to a cloud object in the syntax of the corresponding hosting provider. The volume manager 138 is configured to perform data reads and writes to specified physical addresses, such as the physical addresses stored in the object index 154.

In some implementations, the containerized storage virtualization system 130 may utilize an additional layer of indirection between the object index 154 and the actual physical location of objects. In such implementations, the volume manager 138 may assign and/or divide the underlying storage allocations at each mount point provided by the control plane 140 into extents (or also referred to as mini-volumes). The additional layer of indirection may be implemented by storing a virtual address instead of a physical address in the object index 154 in association with an object signature and maintaining an extent table that maps a given virtual address to an extent and thus the corresponding underlying storage. Thus, to access an object based on a virtual address, the volume manager 138 can first identify the extent targeted by the virtual address using the extent table and a first portion of the virtual address, and then locate the object within the extent using a second portion of the virtual address. In this manner, certain data services such as migration and tiering between extents may be performed in an efficient manner by updating just extent identifiers in the extent table, rather than updating a large amount of in-memory or persisted references to the data objects (i.e., each affected address in the object index 154) and regenerating various logical addresses, indexes, and other data structures utilized in managing the storage system.

Within the storage virtualization layer 150, the storage virtualizer 136 maintains one or more virtual persistent volumes backed by the object store 152. In some implementations, a containerized application will be associated with a virtual PV in a one-to-one relationship. For example, in the example illustration of FIG. 1, containerized application 124 is associated with virtual PV 156, and containerized application 126 is associated with virtual PV 158. In some implementations, each virtual PV is mapped by the container orchestrator 122 to a corresponding orchestrator persistent volume maintained by the container orchestrator 122, and the requesting containerized application 124 accesses the storage of the virtual PV 156 is accessed by via the orchestrator persistent volume.

In other cases, containerized applications and virtual PVs may be associated in one-to-many, many-to-one, or many-to-many relationships. For the sake of illustration only, virtual PVs will now be described with reference to virtual PV 156, although it should be understood that like description may apply to other virtual PVs such as virtual PV 158 and other virtual PVs not shown.

In an implementation, virtual persistent volume 156 may be an organization of metadata objects and data objects stored in the object store 152, where the organization hierarchically relates the data objects by associated content-based signatures up to a root object. In an example, the virtual PV 156 may be a Merkle tree (also referred to as a hash tree) or any other hierarchical arrangement (e.g., directed acyclic graphs, etc.). In the case of a hierarchical Merkle tree, data objects may be located at the lowest tree level of any branch (also referred to as the leaf level, which is most distant from the root object) and such data objects may be referred to as leaf data objects. As described above, data objects make up the data of the containerized application 124, such as files and directories.

Within the hierarchical arrangement, a parent object refers to an object that includes as its content the signatures of child objects. For example, a parent object of leaf level data objects is a metadata object that stores as its content the signatures of its child leaf level data objects. In this manner, the signatures of objects at each level are collected in parent objects at a next level higher in the hierarchical arrangement until the root object is reached. Thus, the root object also is a metadata object that stores as content the signatures of respective child objects. From another perspective, the hierarchical arrangement expands in a direction from the root object to the leaf level—a metadata object at any given level may expand to a number of child nodes dictated by a predefined branching factor. A metadata object may be able to store a quantity of signatures that is at least equal to a branching factor of the hierarchical arrangement, so that it may hold the signatures of all child objects.

Any change in the data of the virtual PV (i.e., new data, modified data, deleted data) translates to a change in the content of one or more leaf level data objects, which will precipitate a change in the content-based signatures of those changed data objects, which will cause content and signature changes to propagate through parent nodes upward to the root object. Thus, a virtual PV 156 at a given point in time (also referred to as a snapshot in time) may be identified uniquely by its root object, and more particularly, identified by its root object signature.

Another aspect of virtual PV 156 is that, in some implementations, a given file or directory from among the containerized application 124 may be stored in a corresponding subtree arrangement within the virtual PV 156. In other words, the virtual PV 156 may be delineated into subtrees, each of which correspond to a respective file or directory of the containerized application 124.

Because files and directories are made up of one or more data objects and those data objects are arranged in the virtual PV 156 and subtrees thereof by reference to associated data object signatures, in some implementations each of the data objects may be physically stored just once in the object store 152 and referred to by their respective signatures in multiple metadata objects in the virtual PV 156 or in any other virtual PV (e.g., 158) in the storage virtualization layer 150. Thus, data may be deduplicated in this manner by the storage virtualizer 136. Similarly, metadata objects can be stored once and referred to multiple times by corresponding signatures. The number of times a data object or metadata object is referenced in the storage virtualization layer 150 may be recorded in the corresponding reference counters of the object index 154. In some implementations, deduplication of data may be performed inline during a write operation, in contrast to post-processed or near-line deduplication, and in this manner, storage of data may be described as natively deduplicated in the storage virtualization layer 150 and among the virtual PVs 156, 158.

In use cases where security is a consideration, including multi-tenancy scenarios, separate object stores may be utilized for each sensitive security domain. Thus, sensitive data may be isolated to a secured object store without participating in the deduplication of other virtual PVs not within the security domain.

In order for the containerized application 124 to access the virtual PV 156, the data path 132 may provide a mount point 180. The data path 132 can provide any type of mount point from a plurality of types of mount points, including without limitation, a block type mount point (e.g., iSCSI compatible), a file type mount point (e.g., a Filesystem in Userspace or FUSE interface, or NFS, SMB, or CIFS compatible), a key/value share mount point (e.g., a noSQL volume or an Amazon S3 compatible API), and other types of mount points. In this manner, the mount point may be understood to contribute to complete storage access abstraction, because the containerized application 124 is provided with whatever type of storage access is required by the containerized application 124 (e.g., file protocol or block protocol, etc.) regardless of the underlying type of storage that makes up the virtual PV 156 (e.g., regardless of software-based or hardware-based, block or file, local or remote, etc.).

The type of mount point, that is, the type of abstraction, may be user selected or may be predefined according to the containerized application 124 requesting the storage (i.e., based on a class of containerized application, dictated by the container orchestrator 122, etc.). The type of abstraction may be indicated to the containerized storage virtualization system 130 via the storage request received at the control plane 140.

In the example of FIG. 1, the containerized storage virtualization system 130 also may provide a mount point 182 to containerized application 126 to access a virtual persistent volume 158 created in response to a request for storage from the containerized application 126 to the container orchestrator 122, in a manner similar to that described above for the mount point 180 of virtual PV 156 for containerized application 124. The virtual PVs 156 and 158 may both include respective Merkle trees for organizing respective sets of data, while the object store 152 stores the data of both virtual PVs 156 and 158 in a deduplicated manner.

In operation (i.e., after the virtual PV 156 is created and mount point 180 provided to application 124), the storage virtualization system 130 may service input/output (I/O) requests from the containerized application 124 directed to a virtual PV 156 via the mount point 180. For example, to serve a read request received through the mount point 180, the storage virtualizer 136 may identify the signatures of data objects in the virtual PV addressed by the read request (i.e., which may include walking the Merkle tree structure of the virtual PV based on an address of the read request) and determine the physical addresses of those data object signatures from the object index 154. In some implementations, the physical address of a data object may specify the mount point of the underlying storage allocation where the data object is stored (e.g., one or more of mount points 170, 172, 174, 176, or 178). The storage virtualization system via the volume manager 138 may then read the data objects using the physical addresses (or using a virtual address and extent table as described above) and return the read data to the containerized application 124 through the mount point 180.

To serve a write request, the storage virtualizer 136 may, in example implementations, receive the data to be written to the virtual PV 156 from the containerized application 124, check whether the data includes any data objects that are new to the object store 152 based on content-based signatures, and write to the object store the new data objects (i.e., data objects that do not already exist in the data store). In some implementations, the storage virtualizer 136 may compress the new data objects before writing to the object store 152. The process of writing to the object store 152 in particular may involve controlling to which underlying storage allocation (e.g., 106, 108, 160, 162, or 164) the new data objects are written. In some implementations, the containerized application may indicate in the write request to which underlying storage allocation to write the data. In some implementations, new data may be written by default to a local storage portion of the virtual PV 156, such as locally attached physical storage 106, which may provide “hot” tier storage optimized for frequent access. In some implementations, the containerized application may indicate a particular policy or service level agreement for writing the data and the storage virtualization system may determine which underlying storage allocation meets that policy or SLA. The storage virtualization system then utilizes the mount point (e.g., 170, 172, 174, 176, or 178) corresponding to that underlying storage allocation to write the data objects. The storage virtualization system also adds the signature of data objects to metadata objects of the virtual PV 156.

Representing data in a virtual PV 156 that is natively deduplicated and uniquely identified by a root object signature may enable efficient data services, including those provided by data services provider 134. For example, data services provider 134 may perform, without limitation, snapshot-based back up, replication, migration, tiering, redundancy-based data protection (e.g., redundant array of independent nodes, also referred to as RAIN; or RAID), or other capabilities. The data services provider 134 may perform the data services with the virtual PV 156 in a manner that is transparent or non-disruptive to the containerized application 124. For example, the data services can be performed without modifying the mount point 180 and in the case of some data services, without input or instruction (e.g., configuration details, set up commands, etc.) from a user, the containerized application 124, or the container orchestrator 122. Moreover, in some examples, the data services provider 134 may manipulate data primarily at the storage virtualization layer 150, such that the data services are performed in a manner that is irrespective of the different underlying storage mounts and the particular composition of the virtual PV 156. In other words, the data services provider 134 can consistently perform a common set of data services regardless of what type of underlying storage makes up the virtual PV 156 in a non-disruptive manner. The foregoing technical benefits may be made possible by virtue of, for example, the virtual PV 156 decoupling the underlying storage from the containerized application 124.

For example, data services provider 134 may perform an efficient snapshot-based backup data service. In some implementations, the difference between snapshots in time of a hierarchically arranged virtual PV 156 can be efficiently accomplished by comparing object signatures in a top-down iterative manner starting at the root object to find metadata and data objects that differ. For example, in an operation to back up a current state of the virtual PV 156 (i.e., a current snapshot), the current snapshot may be on a primary system (e.g., computing system 100) and an older, previously backed up, snapshot may already exist on a backup system (e.g., computing system 110). In that example, the difference between the current snapshot and the older snapshot may be determined by comparing signatures of the snapshots in the previously described manner, and the backup system may be searched to determine if the metadata or data objects that differ already exist on the backup system (i.e., in an object store of the backup system). Only those metadata or data object that do not exist are copied from the primary system to the backup system, thus reducing the amount of data traffic and improving backup times. In other implementations, snapshot-based backups may be made on the same primary system instead of or in addition to the backup system in a similar manner.

The snapshot-based backup may be performed on a scheduled basis for example, without disrupting the containerized application 124. Moreover, the snapshot-based back up may be performed primarily at the software virtualization layer 150, thus avoiding complexities of managing each individual underlying storage directly. Similar to the backup process, a restoration process may also proceed with a comparison of the metadata or data objects to be restored and the objects already existing on the restoration target, and a transmission of only that data that does not exist on the restoration target.

The data services provider 134 may also perform a migration operation. The migration may move data objects between different ones of the underlying storage within a virtual PV 156, including between different local storage, between local and remote storage, between different remote storage, between different public cloud storage, between public cloud storage and non-public cloud storage (either local or remote), or between other combinations of underlying storage. The migration is handled at the storage virtualization layer 150 by associating the new physical address of a moved data object to the unchanged content-based signature in the object index 154, thus making the migration transparent to the containerized application 124.

As another example, the data services provider 134 may migrate the virtual PV 156 to a different computing system. For example, in some cases, it may be useful to migrate a virtual PV 156 to be close to a workload using the virtual PV 156. In an example scenario, the container orchestrator 122 may move the containerized application 124 to a different computing system (e.g., from source computing system 100 to destination computing system 110) for the sake of load balancing or another reason, and the virtual PV 156 may need to be migrated to be close to the containerized application 124. In some implementations, the storage virtualization system 130 may migrate management of the virtual PV 156 to another storage virtualization system on the destination computing system 110 to which the containerized application 124 was migrated. The data services provider 134 may also migrate some of the data in the virtual PV 156, such as migrating data objects that were local to the computing system 100 (e.g., on underlying physical storage 106) to the physical storage of the different computing system 110, which may be useful for maintaining storage locality and other performance characteristics of the virtual PV 156, Such migration may involve identifying whether the destination computing system 110 already has a copy of metadata or data objects to be migrated, and transmitting only data objects that do not exist on the destination computing system 110. At the same time, the same mount point 180 may be maintained and undisrupted for the containerized application 124.

The data services provider 134 may also perform data tiering within a virtual PV 156, that is, moving data between different types of underlying storage that may offer different characteristics and comply with different storage policies. For example, tiering may be implemented by virtue of assigning and/or dividing the constituent storage allocations of the virtual PV 156 to different extents, as previously described. Under certain triggering conditions, the data services provider 134 (in conjunction with the volume manager 138 in some implementations) may move data objects from one extent to a different extent, and update the extent table accordingly. Example triggering conditions may include an increased security status of data which may cause the data services provider 134 to move that data from public cloud storage 164 to non-cloud storage 106, 108, 160, or 162; aging of data which may cause the data services provider 134 to move that data to an archival class of storage (e.g., remote storage 160); recent frequent access of data which may cause the data services provider 134 to move that data to high performance storage (e.g., local physical storage 106); or other types of conditions. By virtue of moving and managing data at the storage virtualization layer 150, data tiering may be performed across any type of underlying storage and without disrupting the mount point 180 or containerized application 124.

The data services provider 134 may also support redundancy based data protection. For example, the data services provider 134 may provide RAID data protection. For example, the data services provider 134 (in conjunction with the volume manager 138 in some implementations) may create a RAID set across underlying storage allocations or within an underlying storage allocation (e.g., in cases where local physical storage 106 includes a set of drives). The data services provider 134 may feature a software RAID controller or cooperate with a hardware RAID controller to write objects of the virtual PV 156 to the RAID set according to a RAID scheme such as RAID 1, RAID5, or RAID 6.

The data services provider 134 also may provide RAIN data protection by replicating or mirroring data of a virtual PV 156 (also referred to as a primary virtual PV for ease of discussion) for data protection and high availability purposes in keeping with RAIN architecture principles. In some implementations, the data services provider 134 may replicate or mirror data at inception when the data comes in to the storage virtualization layer 150 as a write request from the containerized application 124. In some implementations, the replicated data may form a virtual PV replica, which may have a form similar to a virtual PV (e.g., including a Merkle tree) and may be managed by and local to a different storage virtualization system on a different computing system 110, relative to the primary virtual PV that is local to computing system 100. Additionally or alternatively, the virtual PV replica may be made up of underlying storage that is different and/or separate from the underlying storage that makes up primary virtual PV 156. Thus, if data on the primary virtual PV is unrecoverable, the data may be restored from the virtual PV replica using a failover procedure.

To summarize, by virtue of a containerized storage virtualization system 130 aggregating various types of storage into a virtual persistent volume that can be presented as any number of available storage abstractions, the container storage data path can be highly virtualized from end to end. Thus, users of containerized applications may be afforded a high degree of flexibility in requesting any composition of underlying storage to suit performance needs (or other needs) of an application while also being able to consume the storage using any type of abstraction suitable for the application. Moreover, a consistent set of storage services may be provide regardless of the composition of underlying storage and regardless of the type of storage access abstraction used to present the virtual PV.

FIG. 2 depicts an example system that includes a policy engine 242. FIG. 2 also depicts other elements, including a container orchestrator 222, a container storage interface 223, a containerized application 224, a data path 232, a container storage interface API 244, and one or more storage plug-ins (e.g., a storage plug-in A 228-1, a storage plug-in B 228-2, a storage plug-in C 228-3). In some implementations, the foregoing elements of FIG. 2 may be deemed to exist within a same container environment. The policy engine 242 and elements of FIG. 2 (i.e., 222, 223, 224, 232, 244, 228-1, 228-2, 228-3) may each be implemented as hardware or any combination of hardware and programming to implement their respective functionalities as described herein. For example, the programming may be processor executable instructions stored on a non-transitory machine readable medium and the hardware may include a processing resource to retrieve and/or execute those instructions. For example, such a machine readable medium and the processing resource may be analogous in many respects to the machine readable medium 104 and the processing resource 102 of FIG. 1, respectively. Hardware may also include electronic circuitry or logic.

The container orchestrator 222 may be analogous in many respects to the container orchestrator 122 described above. The container orchestrator 222 may serve as a platform for deploying and managing containerized applications, such as containerized application 224, which may be similar to containerized applications 124, 126 described above. Containerized application 224 may include or be associated with one or more containers that may each include one or more microservices, and the one or more containers may be organized into one or more pods.

The container orchestrator 222 may include a container storage interface 223, which may be analogous to container storage interface 123 described above. The container storage interface 223 may enable a plug-in to expose (i.e., make available for use and/or consumption) a storage system to the container orchestrator 222 and an associated container environment, which may be analogous to container environment 120 described above. For example storage A plug-in 228-1 may expose storage system 229-1 to the container orchestrator 222, storage B plug-in 228-2 may expose storage system 229-2 to the container orchestrator 222, and storage C plug-in 228-3 may expose storage system 229-3 to the container orchestrator 222. The plug-ins 228-1, 228-2, and 228-3 (also referred to generally as plug-in(s) 228) may be similar to plug-ins 128 described above, and any of the storage systems 229-1, 229-2, and 229-3 (also referred to generally as storage, storage type(s), or storage system(s) 229) may be local storage devices (e.g., locally attached disk drives), local or remote storage arrays, software-defined storage, cloud storage, or the like, and may be similar to any of the storage systems or storage types described above, such as the physical storage 106, the local file system 108, the remote storage system 160, the virtualized storage 162, or the public cloud storage 164.

For a storage plug-in 228 that is deployed at the container orchestrator 222, the container orchestrator 222 may maintain an object called a storage class that includes parameters (e.g., in the form of key/value pairs) describing an associated storage 229. A storage class may describe characteristics of the storage being offered (e.g., provisionable as a persistent volume through the container storage interface 223), and the described characteristics may include quality of service levels, backup policies, capacity, cost, performance (e.g., IOPS, latency), redundancy, recovery time objective (RTO), recovery point objective (RPO), or other measures. Different storage classes may describe different storage offerings. In some instances, a storage 229 associated with one vendor may have multiple storage classes. Different storage 229 from different vendors may have different storage classes. Storage classes may be non-standardized, between vendors or even within a vendor, since different storage classes may use different parameters.

In FIG. 2, storage A plug-in 228-1 may have at least one associated storage A storage class 226-1, storage B plug-in 228-2 may have at least one associated storage B storage class 226-2, and storage C plug-in 228-3 may have at least one associated storage C storage class 226-3. Storage classes, such as storage A storage class 226-1, storage B storage class 226-2, and storage C storage class 226-3 may be referred to herein generally as storage class(es) 226. Although three storage plug-ins 228, three storage systems 229, and three storage classes 226 are depicted in FIG. 2 as an example, more or fewer storage plug-ins, storage systems, and/or storage classes may be present and available in various implementations.

In some implementations, the policy engine 242 may form at least part of a storage virtualization system, which itself may be a containerized application comprising one or more microservices. For example, the policy engine 242 may serve as or form part of the containerized storage virtualization system 130 of FIG. 1, and more particularly, may serve as or form part of the control plane 140 and/or the policy engine 142 of FIG. 1. As will be described, the policy engine 242 may be useful for, among other things, virtualizing control plane operations to provide containerized applications (e.g., application 224) with a virtual persistent volume backed by one or more types of available storage to meet a policy goal, despite the available storage types being described by non-standardized storage classes. Moreover, as will be described below, the policy engine 242 may intelligently and automatically optimize the virtual persistent volume based on, for example, storage-related performance needs of an associated containerized application.

The policy engine 242 may include and/or interact with one or more elements that each may be implemented as hardware or any combination of hardware and programming to implement their respective functionalities as described herein. In some implementations, the policy engine 242 may include a scheduler 246, a discovery agent 248, a virtual PV manager 250 that includes a provisioner 252 and an optimizer 253, a volume extent and replica manager 254, a container storage interface mapping 256, a data path manager 258, and/or an application storage monitor 259. In some implementations, the policy engine 242 may communicate with the container storage interface 223 (for example, communicate bidirectionally) via a container storage interface API 244, which may be analogous to container storage interface API 144 described above. In some implementations, the policy engine 242 may communicate with a data path 232, which may be analogous to the data path 132 described above, via the data path manager 258 for example.

The discovery agent 248 may determine what plug-ins 228 and associated storage 229 are available in the container environment. Additionally, the discovery agent 248 may retrieve storage classes 226 corresponding to the discovered plug-in(s) 228 and storage 229 and register the retrieved storage classes 226 to the policy engine 242. For example, the discovery agent 248 may collect the foregoing information about plugins 228, storage 229, and storage classes 226 by querying the container orchestrator 222 or container storage interface 223.

In some implementations, the discovery agent 248 may operate at start up or during an initialization phase of a storage virtualization system to which the policy engine 242 belongs and/or may operate periodically while the storage virtualization system is running. As an illustration, a non-limiting example of a container environment may include three to six types of storage plug-ins 228. In various implementations, there may be one or more storage classes for each plug-in 228.

The storage classes 226 registered by the policy engine 242 may be non-standardized, as discussed above. In other words, different storage classes may use different parameters, or more specifically, different keys and/or different values for parameters defined as key/value pairs. The policy engine 242 may utilize a common schema 260 to translate each storage class 226 into a corresponding storage profile. For example, storage A storage class 226-1 may be translated into storage A profile 262-1, storage B storage class 226-2 may be translated into storage B profile 262-2, and so on. Storage profiles, such as storage A storage profile 262-1 and storage B storage profile 262-2, may be referred to herein generally as storage profile(s) 262. In some implementations, the common schema 260 may be manually coded, based on administrator knowledge of the storage classes 226 for example. The common schema 260 may be understood to be a mapping between vendor specific storage class parameters and a common language. In some implementations, as will be described below, the common language of the common schema 260 may be designed in correlation with the creation of virtual PV storage class 227. In some implementations, the storage profiles 262 may be static, in that they are not expected to change after the translation.

To illustrate, the common schema 260 may be useful if a same performance level in storage A storage class 226-1 and storage B storage class 226-1 have values of A and B respectively, and thus are translated into a same performance level value X in storage A profile 262-1 and storage B profile 262-2. Thus, storage profiles 262-1 and 262-2 (translated from storage classes 226-1 and 226-2 respectively) use a common language to describe storage offerings for storage 229-1 and 229-2, respectively.

The policy engine 242 may also present or publish one or more virtual PV storage classes 227 to the container orchestrator 222. A virtual PV storage class 227 may be exposed to users, alongside storage classes 226. Similar to storage classes 226, a virtual PV storage class 227 may describe characteristics of a provisionable persistent volume, and in particular, a persistent volume provisionable from the policy engine 242 or from a storage virtualization system that includes the policy engine 242. In some implementations, a virtual PV storage class 227 and a virtual PV provisioned according to the virtual PV storage class 227 may be deemed to have or meet a default or initial storage policy.

Different virtual PV storage classes 227 may be presented or published to the container orchestrator 222, such as storage classes for different service levels, such as gold, silver, bronze, or dynamic, each with different parameters. For example, each of the different virtual PV storage classes 227 may be designed by an administrator for different virtual storage policy purposes or may be pre-defined by a vendor providing the policy engine 242. For the purposes of illustration, the virtual PV storage class 227 depicted in FIG. 2 is a “dynamic-H” storage class with parameters of type:tiered, performance:high, cost:high, and auto-optimize:yes. Such parameters are useful for determining an initial configuration for a virtual PV (e.g., an initial configuration that is “high” performance and cost, and other medium or low performance dynamic classes may also be available), and the virtual PV can be modified by optimizer 253 (due to “auto-optimize:yes” parameter), as will be described below. Another example virtual PV storage class (not shown) may be a “silver” storage class with parameters of type:tiered, performance:medium, cost:medium, and auto-optimize:no, which may be not auto-optimized by the optimizer 253.

Unlike the storage classes 226, the virtual PV storage class 227 natively conforms to the common schema 260. In other words, the key/value pairs of the virtual PV storage class 227 are in the same language as the common schema 260 and do not need further translation. In some implementations, the virtual PV storage classes 227 may be defined first, and the common schema 260 may be created based on the parameters of the virtual PV storage classes 227.

The application 224, either autonomously or via user input, may request a persistent volume from the container orchestrator 222. The request may also include provisioning requirements, such as an indication that the virtual PV storage class 227 is the desired storage class for the requested persistent volume. Other requirements passed with the request may include a desired capacity, for example. The container orchestrator 222 may in turn pass a create volume request 230, via the container storage interface 223 and the container storage interface API 244 for example, to the policy engine 242. In some implementations, the container orchestrator 222 may extract the parameters of the virtual PV storage class 227 and pass the parameters with the request 230 to the policy engine 242, The request 230 may be received within the policy engine 242 by the virtual PV manager 250.

The virtual PV manager 250 may include various operators for manipulating virtual PVs managed by the policy engine 242, including operators to provision new virtual PVs, delete virtual PVs, handle read/write I/O requests directed to virtual PVs, or other operations. These operators may each be hardware or a combination of hardware and programming to implement their respective functionalities. For example, the virtual PV manager 250 may include a provisioner 252 operator to provision new virtual PVs. The virtual PV manager 250 may also include an optimizer 253 that automatically optimizes virtual PVs based on respective performance metrics associated with those virtual PVs. The functionality of the virtual PV manager 250 and the provisioner 252 and optimizer 253 thereof will now be discussed in greater detail.

In response to the request 230, the provisioner 252 begins the process of creating a virtual PV that will ultimately be returned as virtual PV 280 (i.e., including at least a volume identifier) to the container orchestrator 222 for consumption or use as persistent storage by the containerized application 224. The provisioner 252 determines that the virtual PV storage class 227 was identified in the request 230 as being the desired type of virtual PV to create. The provisioner 252 then assesses each parameter in the requested virtual PV storage class 227 and determines which storage profile 262 has a corresponding parameter that can meet and fulfill the virtual PV storage class 227 parameter. In some implementations, a parameter in the virtual PV storage class 227 is a minimum, such that a closest match of corresponding parameter among the storage profiles 262 exceeds the parameter value in storage class 227. This matching of virtual PV storage class 227 parameter to a parameter of a storage profile 262 is made possible by virtue of the virtual PV storage class 227 and the storage profiles 262 all being compliant with and in the language of the common schema 260. For example, if a requested parameter indicates performance:high, the provisioner 252 would identify a storage profile 262 that also includes performance:high.

In some implementations, the provisioner 252 may match the parameters of virtual PV storage class 227 to parameters of storage profiles 262 on a best fit basis. For example, if no parameters of storage profiles 262 were found that match or exceed the virtual PV storage class 227 parameters, the closest parameter may be selected. For example, if a requested parameter indicates performance:high, the provisioner 252 may select a storage profile with performance:medium over other storage profiles with performance:low.

In some implementations, the provisioner 252 may also determine whether matching the virtual PV storage class 227 to a particular storage profile 262 would violate a resource limit or quota of an associated plug-in 228, and if a violation would occur, avoid matching to that plug-in 228. In some implementations, the provisioner 252 may check remaining capacity of a storage 229 using an out-of-band query command (e.g., not via plug-ins 228, container storage interface API 244, or container storage interface 223).

In some implementations, the provisioner 252 may determine that multiple storage profiles 262 (e.g., more than one) may be combined to meet a parameter of the virtual PV storage class 227. For example, a request 230 may request performance:high and 2 terabyte (TB) capacity. However, in this illustration, storage profiles 262-1 and 262-2 with performance:high parameters are limited to 1 TB volumes, either due to remaining capacity or other resource limitations. In this instance, the provisioner 252 may determine to combine 1 TB of capacity from each of storage profiles 262-1 and 262-2 to fulfill the request for 2 TB performance:high.

In some cases, the provisioner 252 may determine that a single storage profile 262 fulfills all of the parameters virtual PV storage class 227. In some cases, the provisioner 252 may determine that multiple different storage profiles 262 are required to fulfill the parameters of the virtual PV storage class 227. For example, a virtual PV storage class 227 may be of a tiered type and may specify high performance primary storage (e.g., with low latency and/or high IOPS) in a first parameter and archival class storage (e.g., with low cost and/or high write speed) for backup in a second parameter. In this example, presuming that storage A profile 262-1 is associated with a high performance storage array 229-1 and storage B profile 262-2 is associated with an archival/backup storage system for illustration purposes, the provisioner 252 may determine that first parameter is fulfilled by the storage A profile 262-1 and the second parameter is fulfilled by the storage B profile 262-2.

Ultimately, the provisioner 252 may create a mapping of the parameters of the virtual PV storage class 227 to parameters of one or more storage profiles 262 serving as proxies for the storage classes 226, such that the parameters of the virtual PV storage class 227 are fulfilled. Thus, the provisioner 252 also identifies the plug-ins 228 (corresponding to the mapped storage profiles 262) to be used to compose a virtual PV having the characteristics of virtual PV storage class 227.

The provisioner 252 coordinates with the container storage interface mapping 256 to provision volumes from each of the storage plug-ins 228 associated with the mapped profiles 262, using their associated storage classes 226. The provisioner 252 informs the container storage interface mapping 256 of the profiles 262 and the plug-ins 228 that the provisioner 252 identified and mapped to virtual PV storage class 227, and the container storage interface mapping 256 handles low level replacement of each parameter in the virtual PV storage class 227 with one or more of provisioned volumes using the plug-ins 228 identified by the provisioner 252. In this process, the container storage interface mapping 256 may translate parameters of the virtual PV storage class 227 to parameters in the storage classes 226 and then provision volumes using the plug-ins 228 and those translated parameters (since the plug-ins 228 are compatible with the storage classes 226). Provisioning volumes using plug-ins 228 may be similar to provisioning described above in FIG. 1 using plug-ins 128.

To illustrate, if the provisioner 252 determined that storage A profile 262-1 fulfilled a first parameter of the virtual PV storage class 227, the container storage interface mapping 256 may translate that first parameter to a corresponding parameter of storage A storage class 226-1 using the common schema 260 and then issue a create volume request 270 indicating the translated storage A storage class 226-1 parameter (and in some examples, additional parameters such as capacity), via the container storage interface API 244 and the container storage interface 223, to the storage A plug-in 228-1. In turn the storage A plug-in 228-1 provisions storage, e.g., a volume 272, from the storage system 229-1 according to the request 270 and returns the volume 272, which may be identified by a volume identifier or a persistent volume object or other control plane means for handling a provisioned volume. The container storage interface mapping 256 may repeat the process, sequentially or in parallel, for each parameter of the virtual PV storage class 227. Although FIG. 2 depicts one provisioning request with plug-ins 228 for clarity and ease of illustration, it should be understood that in some instances, volumes may be provisioned from more than one plug-in 228 in accordance with the mapping determined by the provisioner 252.

In some implementations, the volume extent and replica manager 254 and/or the data path manager 258 (in conjunction with the data path 232) may provide further functionality for creating and/or managing the virtual PV. Functionality of the volume extent and replica manager 254 may interoperate with the data path manager 258/data path 232 or may be independent of the data path manager 258/data path 232.

In some implementations, the data path manager 258 may send provisioning information 266 to the data path 232. The provisioning information 266 may be information about the volumes provisioned via plug-ins 228 to fulfill the virtual PV storage class 227, such as type(s) of storage, volume identifiers, etc. (e.g., identifying information about volume 272). The data path 232 may then consume those provisioned volumes to create the virtual PV, in a manner similar to that described above with respect to FIG. 1. In particular, the data path 232 may create the virtual PV to be an organization (e.g., Merkle tree) of metadata objects and data objects, stored in the object store, that are hierarchically related by associated content-based signatures up to a root object. In some implementations, the hierarchically-organized, object store-backed virtual PV is returned to the container orchestrator 222 as the virtual PV 280, and the data path 232 may be involved with servicing I/O requests as described above.

An extent, also referred to as a mini-volume, refers to a unit of organization within the virtual PV. The virtual PV may comprise a single extent (corresponding to a single provisioned volume, for example) or multiple extents. An extent may be aligned with a particular volume provisioned via a plug-in 228 or a subdivision thereof. Dividing the virtual PV into extents may allow I/IOs to be efficiently directed to the intended target, such as in the case of tiered storage with high performance tier extents for hot data and archival or backup tier extents for cold data. In this manner, a single virtual PV may have automated built-in tiering capabilities, thus making data tiering simple and invisible to users and administrators. In another example, extents may be useful for managing separate volumes that are to be combined to meet a given parameter of a virtual PV storage class. The volume extent and replica manager 254 may manage extents using an extent table in a manner similar to that described above with respect to FIG. 1 or may offload some or all of such management to the data path 232.

In some implementations, the volume extent and replica manager 254 may coordinate a backup policy specified by the virtual PV storage class 227, throughout the lifecycle of the virtual PV. During the provisioning stage (i.e., after the provisioner 252 has identified primary storage and backup storage from profiles 262 to fulfill the virtual PV storage class 227), the volume extent and replica manager 254 may coordinate with the container storage interface mapping 256 to first provision a backup volume (e.g., from a backup storage system 229-2 via plug-in 228-2) and then provision a primary storage volume (e.g., from a primary storage system 229-1 via plug-in 228-1) using a provisioning request that identifies the backup volume as a replication target. The storage system hosting the primary storage volume (e.g., storage system 229-1) may then utilize its own replication mechanism to backup data to the backup volume (e.g., at storage system 229-2) identified in the provisioning request. In some implementations, a scheduler 246 may operate to schedule backups at a frequency or schedule (e.g., as defined in the virtual PV storage class 227), At each scheduled instance, the scheduler 246 may instruct the primary storage volume plug-in (e.g., 228-1) to backup data to the target backup volume. In this manner, a single virtual PV 280 may include automated backup, thus simplifying backup configuration and maintenance for users and administrators.

Once the one or more volumes have been provisioned via plug-ins 228 in accordance with the virtual PV storage class 227-to-storage profile(s) 262 mapping, a volume mapping is recorded in the virtualization maps 264 data structure that maps the constituent provisioned volumes to the virtual PV being created. As but one example of a mapping, if a VOL(2) was provisioned from the storage A plug-in 228-1 (e.g., VOL(2) being a volume identifier for volume 272) and a VOL(3) was provisioned from the storage B plug-in 228-2 in order to fulfill the virtual PV storage class 227, then a mapping of VIRTUAL_PV(1) (volume ID for virtual PV 280) being composed of VOL(2) and VOL(3) is recorded into the virtualization maps 264 as depicted in FIG. 2. It should be understood that the foregoing is an illustration, and that a virtual PV may be made up of more or fewer provisioned volumes. As multiple virtual PVs are requested (e.g., for the same virtual PV storage class or different virtual PV storage classes), additional mappings are stored in the virtualization maps 264 data structure. In this sense, the virtualization maps 264 data structure may be deemed dynamic, because new maps may be added as new virtual PVs are created and existing maps may be deleted as virtual PVs are deleted.

The policy engine 242 may return the virtual PV 280 by sending at least the virtual persistent volume identifier 281 (e.g., the volume ID VIRTUAL PV(1)) to the container orchestrator 222 via container storage interface API 244 and container storage interface 223, and the container orchestrator 222 may in turn provide the containerized application 224 with access to the virtual PV 280. The container orchestrator 222 may attach or associate the virtual PV identifier 281 of the virtual PV 280 to the containerized application 224 in metadata of the container orchestrator 222. Subsequently, the containerized application 224 may perform read and/or writes to the virtual PV 280, The storage virtualization system to which the policy engine 242 belongs can service I/O requests directed to the virtual PV 280 by mediating those I/O requests with the volumes of storage 229 mapped to the virtual PV 280.

In various implementations and scenarios, the nature of the virtual PV 280 provided by the policy engine 242 may differ. For example, if a single underlying volume is mapped and provisioned for the virtual PV storage class 227, then the policy engine 242 may provide the provisioned volume (e.g., a volume 272) directly as virtual PV 280, without involving the data path 232. In another example, a single underlying provisioned volume (e.g., a volume 272) may be passed to the data path 232 and virtualized as described above (e.g., as a hierarchical structure of objects identified by content-based signatures), and that data path virtualized storage is provided as virtual PV 280. In another example, multiple underlying volumes are mapped and provisioned for the virtual PV storage class 227, those volumes are virtualized through the data path 232 as described above, and that data path virtualized storage is provided as virtual PV 280. For example, in FIG. 2, a virtual PV 280 depicted in dashed lines comprises a volume from storage system 229-1 and a volume from storage system 229-2, provisioned using their respective plug-ins 228-1 and 228-2.

By virtue of the foregoing, the policy engine 242 may identify and construct, in an automated manner, a tailored composition of storage to meet a policy goal represented by in a virtual PV storage class 227 exposed at a container orchestrator 222. The policy engine 242 may leverage an ecosystem of storage plug-ins 228 and storage classes 226 without the intensive manual labor of writing code to support each plug-in 228. Moreover, the policy engine 242 may improve containerized application mobility, because as a containerized application moves to a new container environment, the policy engine 242 can automatically construct the correct persistent storage in the new container environment from storage available and discoverable in that new container environment.

As mentioned previously, the virtual PV 280 as initially created and provided by the policy engine 242 in response to a create volume request 230 and in accordance with the virtual PV storage class 227 may be deemed to have a default storage policy. That is, the virtual PV 280 initially may have characteristics based on a predefined virtual PV storage class, created by an administrator for example. In some implementations, the policy engine 242 may further tune the virtual PV 280 based on information about the requesting containerized application 224 in an effort to further optimize the virtual PV 280 for that application 224. This tuning can take place before or while the containerized application 224 uses the virtual PV 280 as persistent storage.

To begin the tuning, the policy engine 242 may use the volume identifier 281 of the virtual PV 280 to request and read, from the container orchestrator 222, an application manifest 282 of the containerized application 224 attached to that volume identifier. For example, a deployed containerized application 224 may be represented by one or more objects (e.g., Kubernetes objects), and those objects may be expressed as one or more JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) or YAML (YAML Ain't Markup Language) files. The manifest 282 is the collection of those objects (e.g., YAML files), and the manifest 282 may be understood to be a definition of the containerized application 224.

The objects of the manifest 282 may each include a label associated with the containerized application 224. Thus, to find the manifest 282, the policy engine 242 may use the volume identifier of the virtual PV 280 to find a persistent volume object with that volume identifier, read the label of that persistent volume object, and find other objects with the same label.

The manifest 282 may indicate properties such as, for example, a name, the image on which the containerized application 224 is based, a number of replicas (e.g., a number of compute replicas, which may relate to scaling), labels, a pod definition of which the containerized application 224 is a member, an indication of another application that is using or is related to the containerized application 224, or other properties. Example images may include Postgres, Nginx, MongoDB, MySQL, or other images. Such details may not be communicated with the create volume request 230, thus the policy engine 242 would not have received any notion of what the storage requested via create volume request 230 is to be used for or what the nature of the containerized application 224 is.

The policy engine 242 may analyze the application manifest 282 by comparing information of the manifest 282 to one or more preconfigured application data store profiles, such as application data store profile A 284-1 and application data store profile B 284-2 (also referred to generally as application data store profile(s) 284) depicted in FIG. 2, although more or fewer application data store profiles may be available in different examples. The policy engine 242 may then identify a particular application data store profile that matches the manifest. For example, each of the application data store profiles 284 are predetermined, as will be discussed below, to provide tailored storage for a corresponding application type. In some implementations, an application data store profile 284 may include matching criteria metadata that indicates what application type the profile is tailored for, including metadata such as a name, an image name, labels, number of replicas (e.g., compute replicas), and/or other properties. The policy engine 242 can identify a best-fit match between properties of the application manifest 282 and the matching criteria metadata information of the application data store profiles 284 (i.e., a best-fit match may be an application data store profile that matches more of the information of the manifest 282 than other application data store profiles). The best-fit match may be based on various logic, rules, filtering, weighting, or the like, or any combination thereof (e.g., a container image name match may be most heavily weighted in some implementations).

An application data store profile 284 may be a profile describing characteristics of a data store used by a particular application, and more particularly, the characteristics may be optimized for the particular application. The application data store profiles 284 may be preconfigured based on an understanding of storage usage by respective application types. The application data store profiles 284 may be preconfigured manually by developers or in a semi-automated or automated fashion using machine learning techniques. In some implementations, the application data store profiles 284 may be human readable text files, for example.

The understanding of storage usage upon which the profiles 284 are based may be acquired in various ways. For example, in some cases, an application type associated with a given image may be presumed to use a certain type of storage, based on domain expertise or based on an analysis of the source code of the image (e.g., if open source). In other examples, instances of the application type may be deployed, and while the instances are running, storage-related calls (e.g., at a file system layer) may be intercepted or other storage-related behaviors may be observed (e.g., I/O patterns, etc.). Those test observations and intercepted calls can be analyzed to deduce storage usage. The storage usage determined by any of the foregoing methods may include caching patterns, I/O patterns, replication behavior, or other characteristics, which can be used as a first class hint about how the corresponding application type uses storage. Various application types can be analyzed according to any of the foregoing methods, and application types may include different deployment configurations of a same application image (e.g., a fast Postgres instance, a small Postgres instance, a large Postgres instance). In some implementations, the analyzed application types may be selected based on the most common and/or most popular types of containerized applications deployed.

Each application data store profile 284 may be constructed to include storage parameters for configuring a virtual PV to align with the storage usage determined for the corresponding application type. The storage parameters may specify aspects of a virtual PV such as a type of underlying storage (e.g., having desired performance or cost characteristics), storage capacity, tiering, a replication policy, a backup policy, a data prioritization policy, or other storage properties. Storage usage of various application types and configurations thereof may widely differ, thus the storage parameters specified in application data store profiles 284 may also differ. In addition to storage parameters, an application data store profile 284 may also indicate relevant performance metrics to be used by the optimizer 253 to auto-optimize storage (e.g., a virtual persistent volume) for the corresponding application type, as will be described below, Once constructed, the application data store profiles 284 may be made available to the policy engine 242 for use in tuning virtual PVs based on application manifests.

In some implementations, the profile engine 242 may receive and store one or more custom application data store profiles. For example, a user may create a custom application data store profile to add to the preconfigured application data store profiles 284. Custom application data store profiles may be useful for users with particular application and storage deployments that were not anticipated by the preconfigured application data store profiles 284 for example. An author of a custom application data store profile may also provide an associated matching criteria metadata and best-fit algorithm.

Returning to the tuning functionality, after the policy engine 242 has identified an application data store profile 284 that matches the application manifest 282, the policy engine 242 (via the above described functionality of the virtual PV manager 250, the container storage interface mapping 256, the volume extent and replica manager 254, and/or the data path manager 258) can modify the virtual PV 280 according to the storage parameters of the identified application data store profile 284, such that the virtual PV 280 has an updated application-centric storage policy. In many instances, the modifications can be made to the virtual PV 280 in a manner that is transparent and non-disruptive to the containerized application 224, particularly if the virtual PV 280 is virtualized and abstracted by way of the data path 232 and modifications are made at the data path 232 (e.g., modifications to extents or to object-based hierarchical arrangement of data) or at the underlying storages 229. Any changes to the constituent volumes of the virtual PV 280 may be updated in the virtualization maps 264, without changing the volume identifier for virtual PV 280. In some implementations, the policy engine 242 need not send any updates to the container orchestrator 222 about the modified virtual PV 280, as the volume identifier remains the same as before modification.

The policy engine 242 may also include an optimizer 253 that, in conjunction with an application storage monitor 259 and monitoring system 290, can auto-optimize virtual PVs in the following manner. Virtual PVs created from a dynamic storage class (e.g., auto-optimize:yes) may be flagged by the optimizer 253 for optimization. Optimization may be performed by the optimizer 253 in real-time or near real-time, regularly, periodically, or on a scheduled basis, depending in part on the frequency of metric collection for example. Optimization may involve modifying a composition of a virtual PV based on an analysis of performance metrics scrapped or collected from containerized applications and microservices thereof related to the usage and operation of the virtual PV. Optimization may be performed with or without tuning based on parameters of an application data store profile, as described above.

Example sources of performance metrics will first be described. In some implementations, metrics instrumentation may be included in the data path 232 and/or the containerized application 224 (or in one or more microservices thereof) to collect metrics 292 and metrics 294 about the performance of the data path 232 and/or the containerized application 224, respectively. The metrics 292, 294 may be time series performance data in the form of a counter (e.g., a monotonically increasing value), a gauge (e.g., a value that can go up or down), a histogram, or other forms. Metrics 292, 294 may include general performance data related to processor (CPU) or memory usage, storage-related performance information, such as read IOPS, write IOPS, latency per read, latency per write, etc., or other types of performance information. Each of the metrics may be identified by a metric name. In some implementations, the metrics 292, 294 may be pushed to a gateway or exposed to be pulled (e.g., as an HTTP endpoint) by the monitoring system 290. The instrumentation and presentation of the metrics 292, 294 may be in accordance with a standard, such as a standard defined for the Prometheus.

The metrics 292 may relate to performance of the data path 232 itself. In some implementations, the data path 232 may be managing multiple virtual PVs, and the data path 232 may be instrumented to provide performance metrics separately per virtual PV. In some implementations, the data path 232 also may be instrumented to provide performance metrics associated with the backend storage systems 229, based on interactions between the data path 232 and those backends in service I/O to underlying storage volumes.

For a virtual PV such as virtual PV 280 to be optimized; the policy engine 242 (or the optimizer 253 particularly) may use the virtual PV identifier to find an application manifest 282 associated with the containerized application 224 that is using the virtual PV 280. Based on the application manifest 282, the policy engine 242 can identify microservices associated with the containerized application 224, which can serve as targets for scrapping performance metrics.

The policy engine 242 may also identify an application data store profile 284 that matches the application manifest 282, in the manner described above (e.g., by matching metadata, such as an image name). The identified application data store profile 284 may indicate what particular performance metrics are relevant as inputs to optimizer 253 for optimizing a data store (i.e., virtual PV 280) used by the application type matching the identified application data store profile 284. For example, the application data store profile 284 may indicate that a metric to be collected includes one or more of read IOPS, write IOPS, combined read+write IOPS, latency per read, latency per write, CPU usage, memory usage, or other performance metrics. The application data store profile 284 may also indicate that a metric is to be collected with respect to a particular virtual PV (e.g., where data path 232 can export data path performance metrics individually per virtual PV). Such an indication of relevant metrics to collect may be useful in cases where the available metrics among metrics 292, 294 are numerous and of varying relevance or utility to optimizing virtual PV 280, due in some cases to metrics being collected for many other purposes. The application data store profile 284 may also indicate which targets to collect performance metrics from, such as the containerized application (e.g., 224), the data path 232, and/or other related applications or microservices related to usage of the virtual PV 280.

In some implementations, the application data store profile 284 may also include a metric name mapping between a metric to be retrieved and corresponding different metric names specific to containerized applications. The different metric names may arise due to non-standardization among developers of containerized applications, but such different metric names may be deemed to effectively refer to a same or similar metric.

A monitoring system (which may also be referred to as a monitoring server) may be provided in the container environment for collecting metrics from instrumented applications or microservices thereof, either directly (e.g., by scraping HTTP endpoints of instrumented microservices) or via a gateway for pushed metrics, for example. The monitoring system 290 may be a containerized application itself, executing on a processing resource in the container environment. The monitoring system 290 may be a single monitoring system or a collection of monitoring systems.

In some implementations, a monitoring system may be started in the container environment in relation to starting up an instrumented application. For example, a monitoring system 290 may be started up for the data path 232 as a microservice, the storage virtualization system to which the data path 232 belongs, or the containerized application 224. In some implementations, the monitoring system 290 can be configured to collect metrics from any instrumented containerized application, even if the monitoring system 290 was not started for that particular application. In some implementations, the monitoring system 290 may include a monitoring system that collects metrics from another monitoring system, and such a monitoring system 290 may be referred to as a monitoring federation. In some implementations, the monitoring system 290 may be a central monitoring service started to collect metrics from multiple containerized applications. The monitoring system 290 may also process collected metrics, by averaging the metrics for example. An example implementation of the monitoring system 290 may include a Prometheus server.

The policy engine 242 may configure the monitoring system 290 in accordance with any metrics and targets defined in the application data store profile 284 and using target information determined from the application manifest 282. In some implementations, an example monitoring system 290 may be configured using YAML file that indicates a target (e.g., HTTP endpoint), metric name, sampling rate, and/or other parameters. The metric name may be specific to the target based on the mapping included in the application data store profile 284. The monitoring system 290 so configured may collect desired metrics from metrics 292 and/or metrics 294 and store the collected metrics as metrics 296.

The policy engine 242 may include an application storage monitor 259 to receive some or all of metrics 296 from the monitoring system 290 and provide those received metrics to the optimizer 253. In some implementations, the application storage monitor 259 may pull metrics 296 from the monitoring system 290 via an API of the monitoring system 290. The application storage monitor 259 may specify a time range of metrics 296 to collect.

The optimizer 253 may analyze the metrics received by the application storage monitor 259 to determine an optimization strategy for the virtual PV 280. For example, the optimizer 253 may include pre-configured logic or rules that dictate certain actions to perform on the virtual PV 280 in response to certain values or trends observed from the metrics. Example actions may include adding capacity to the virtual PV 280, modifying the underlying volume composition of the virtual PV 280, enabling or disabling storage services (e.g., tiering, snapshotting, replication, migration, redundancy-based data protection, caching, or other services), or other actions. Adding capacity or modifying the underlying volume composition may be accomplished by adding underlying volumes as extents managed by the data path 232, in the manner described above.

For example, the optimizer 253 may modify the composition of the virtual PV 280 when the optimizer 253 determines characteristics of a particular storage profile 262 (and thus storage class 226) are better suited for the how the application 224 is using the virtual PV 280 based on values or trends observed from the metrics. Characteristics of the storage profiles 262 that may assist in such a determination include characteristics described above, such as performance:high/medium/low, as well as indications of a type of media (e.g., hard disk drive, solid state disk, etc.), performance of the media (e.g., 7200 RPM or 5400 RPM for hard disk drive), maximum supported IOPS, or other storage characteristics. After identifying one or more storage profiles 262 that suit actual storage according to the metrics, the optimizer 253 may operate in conjunction with the provisioner 252 to provision one or more new underlying volumes from those storage profiles 262 and migrate data of the virtual PV 280 to those new underlying volume(s), thus modifying virtual PV 280 to virtual PV 280′. The underlying volume composition for virtual PV 280′ may be updated in virtualization maps 264, but the virtual PV 280′ may be identified by the same virtual PV identifier 281 as virtual PV 280.

Some non-limiting examples of optimizer 253 logic modifying virtual PV composition or services in response to metrics will now be described. In some implementations, the optimizer 253 may determine that the metrics indicate a shift in I/O towards being more read oriented (e.g., indicated by increasing read IOPS and/or decreasing write IOPS metrics), and the optimizer 253 may attempt to identify a storage profile 262 representing storage that is favorable for read operations, such as SSD (solid state disk) or NVMe (non-volatile memory express) class storage. On the other hand, if the optimizer determines that the metrics indicate a shift in I/O towards being more write oriented, the optimizer 253 may avoid storage profiles 262 representing storage that may be write bandwidth limited, such as SSD.

In some implementations, the optimizer 253 may determine that the metrics indicate that virtual PV 280 is used in a read-only capacity (e.g., sustained zero write IOPS or write IOPS below a threshold). In response, the optimizer 253 may attempt to identify a storage profile 262 that represents archival-class storage, which may replace (by migration) some or all of virtual PV 280.

In some implementations, the optimizer 253 may determine that the metrics indicate increasing latency. In response, the optimizer 253 may attempt to identify a storage profile 262 that represents more performant and/or scalable storage system than is currently used in virtual PV 280, which may be added to virtual PV 280 or may replace (by migration) some or all of virtual PV 280. For example, the optimizer 253 may maintain a performance ranking of vendor systems and may cross reference the ranking against system names in the storage classes 262.

In some implementations, the optimizer 253 may determine that the metrics indicate the read IOPS, write IOPS, or total IOPS are at or approaching a maximum supported IOPS of the underlying storage of virtual PV 280, In response, the optimizer 253 may attempt to identify a storage profile 262 with a higher supported IOPS, which may be added to the virtual PV 280 or may replace (by migration) some or all of virtual PV 280.

In some implementations, the optimizer 253 may determine that the number of I/Os for the virtual PV 280 (e.g., indicated by read IOPS, write IOPS, or total IOPS) have increased or are increasing. In response, the optimizer 253 may cause the data path manager 258 to issue provisioning information 266 to enable a cache service at data path 232 for the virtual PV 280 or to allocate additional cache at the data path 232 for the virtual PV 280.

In some implementations, the optimizer 253 may analyze metrics related to performance of backend storage systems used by the virtual PV 280 and may detect a load imbalance among the backend storage systems. For example, an overloaded backend storage system may be a bottleneck. In response, the optimizer 253 may identify a storage profile 262 comparable to or more performant than the overloaded backend and may provision a new underlying volume to be added to the virtual PV 280 or to replace some or all of the virtual PV 280, to improve the load balance.

FIGS. 3 and 4 are flow diagrams depicting various example methods. In some implementations, one or more blocks of the methods may be executed substantially concurrently or in a different order than shown. In some implementations, a method may include more or fewer blocks than are shown. In some implementations, one or more of the blocks of a method may, at certain times, be ongoing and/or may repeat. In some implementations, blocks of the methods may be combined.

The methods shown in FIGS. 3 and 4 may be implemented in the form of executable instructions stored on a machine readable medium and executed by a processing resource and/or in the form of electronic circuitry. For example, aspects of the methods may be described below as being performed by a storage virtualization system, an example of which may be the containerized storage virtualization system 130 running on a hardware processor resource 102 of the computing system 100 described above, and may be performed more particularly by a policy engine of such a storage virtualization system, such as the policy engine 242 described above. Additionally, other aspects of the methods described below may be described with reference to other elements shown in FIG. 2 for non-limiting illustration purposes.

FIG. 3 is a flow diagram depicting an example method 300, Method 300 starts at block 302 and continues to block 304, where the storage virtualization system may identify an application data store profile (e.g., 284-1) from among a plurality of application data store profiles 284 based on an application manifest 282 of a containerized application 224 to which a virtual persistent volume 280 is allocated. For example, as described above, the storage virtualization system may use a virtual PV identifier of the virtual PV 280 to locate the application manifest 282, and may match metadata (e.g., image name, etc.) of the application manifest 292 to that of the application data store profiles 284. An application data store profile 284 may include storage parameters preconfigured for a particular application type, and may also indicate performance metrics by name that are relevant to optimizing storage (e.g., a virtual PV) used by that particular application type. Also as described above, the virtual PV 280 is composed by a data path 232 of the storage virtualization system from at least one underlying storage volume 272.

In some implementations, the storage virtualization system may configure a monitoring system 290 to scrape performance metrics, particularly the metrics named in the application data store profile 284-1 identified at block 304, from instrumented applications and microservices thereof. The performance metrics may be storage performance metrics, such as IOPS (read IOPS and/or write IOPS), latency (read and/or write latency), or other metrics. An example target to collect metrics from includes the data path 232, which may provide storage performance metrics about the data path in relation to input/output operations for the virtual PV 280. An additional or alternative example target to collect metrics from includes the containerized application 224. The monitoring system 290 stores the collected metrics 296.

At block 306, the storage virtualization system receives the performance metrics that are indicated in the application data store profile 284. In some implementations, the storage virtualization system pulls the metrics from the monitoring system 290 (e.g., via an API call).

At block 308, the storage virtualization system modifies the virtual PV 280 based on an analysis of the performance metrics received at block 306. The method 300 ends at block 312. In this manner, the storage virtualization system can utilize a microservice monitoring framework to automatically optimize a virtual persistent volume.

FIG. 4 is a flow diagram depicting an example method 400. Method 400 starts at block 402 and continues to block 404, where a storage virtualization system determines whether a storage class associated with a virtual PV 280 (e.g., the storage class 227 according to which the virtual PV 280 was created) is of a dynamic type. If the storage class is not a dynamic type (“NO” at block 404), the method 400 does not perform optimization on the virtual PV 280 and proceeds to end at block 416. If the storage class is a dynamic type (“YES” at block 404), the method 400 continues to block 406.

Block 406 may be analogous to block 304 in many respects. At block 406, the storage virtualization system identifies an application data store profile 284 based on an application manifest 282 of a containerized application 224 utilizing the virtual PV 280. Block 408 may be analogous to block 306. At block 408, the storage virtualization system receives performance metrics indicating how the containerized application 224 uses the virtual PV 280. As described above, the metrics may be pulled from metrics 296 on a monitoring system 290 configured to scrape metrics according to the application data store profile 284 from instrumented applications or microservices.

At block 410, the storage virtualization system analyzes the performance metrics received at block 408. The storage virtualization system determines trends in the performance metrics, such as those described above with reference to optimizer 253, and attempts to identify one or more storage classes 226 available in the container environment, as represented by storage profiles 262, that are optimized for or match the determined trends.

At block 412, the storage virtualization system provisions new underlying storage volumes using the one or more storage classes 226 (via corresponding storage profiles 262) identified at block 410.

At block 414, the storage virtualization system modifies the virtual PV 280 (e.g., into virtual PV 280′) based on the analysis performed at block 410 by including the new underlying storage volumes provisioned at block 412. In some implementations, the virtual PV 280 may be modified by adding the new underlying storage volumes to the virtual PV 280, and in some scenarios, by migrating data from existing underlying storage volumes to the new underlying storage volumes. The mapping for virtual PV 280 to underlying storage volumes may be updated in the virtualization maps 264.

The method 400 ends at block 416. The storage virtualization system may repeat method 400 periodically for the virtual PV 280.

FIG. 5 depicts an example system 500 that includes non-transitory, machine readable medium 504 encoded with example instructions executable by a processing resource 502. In some implementations, the system 500 may be useful for implementing aspects of the storage virtualization system 130 of FIG. 1 or the policy engine 242 of FIG. 2 or for performing aspects of methods 300 and/or 400 of FIGS. 3 and 4, respectively. For example, the instructions encoded on machine readable medium 504 may be included in instructions 105 of FIG. 1. In some implementations, functionality described with respect to FIG. 2 may be included in the instructions encoded on machine readable medium 504.

The processing resource 502 may include a microcontroller, a microprocessor, central processing unit core(s), an ASIC, an FPGA, and/or other hardware device suitable for retrieval and/or execution of instructions from the machine readable medium 504 to perform functions related to various examples. Additionally or alternatively, the processing resource 502 may include or be coupled to electronic circuitry or dedicated logic for performing some or all of the functionality of the instructions described herein.

The machine readable medium 504 may be any medium suitable for storing executable instructions, such as RAM, ROM, EEPROM, flash memory, a hard disk drive, an optical disc, or the like. In some example implementations, the machine readable medium 504 may be a tangible, non-transitory medium. The machine readable medium 504 may be disposed within the system 500, in which case the executable instructions may be deemed installed or embedded on the system. Alternatively, the machine readable medium 504 may be a portable (e.g., external) storage medium, and may be part of an installation package.

As described further herein below, the machine readable medium 504 may be encoded with a set of executable instructions. It should be understood that part or all of the executable instructions and/or electronic circuits included within one box may, in alternate implementations, be included in a different box shown in the figures or in a different box not shown. Some implementations may include more or fewer instructions than are shown in FIG. 5.

With reference to FIG. 5, the machine readable medium 504 includes instructions 506, 508, 510. Instructions 506, when executed, cause the processing resource 502 to identify an application data store profile from among a plurality of application data store profiles that each include storage parameters preconfigured for a respective application type, based on an application manifest of a containerized application to which a virtual PV is allocated. The virtual PV is composed by a data path of a storage virtualization system from at least one underlying storage volume.

The identified application data store profile indicates performance metrics relevant to optimizing the virtual PV. The performance metrics are related to usage of the virtual persistent volume by the containerized application and may include, for example, IOPS (e.g., read IOPS, write IOPS, total IOPS), latency (e.g., read latency, write latency), or other storage related performance metrics. In some examples, the performance metrics may be storage performance metrics about the data path, and in other examples, about the data path specifically related to I/O operations for the virtual PV and not I/O operations for other virtual PVs. In some examples, the performance metrics are storage performance metrics of the containerized application.

In some implementations, the machine readable medium 504 includes instructions to configure a monitoring system in the container environment to scrape the performance metrics indicated in the identified application data store profile from instrumented applications or microservices related to the data path or to the containerized application and store the scraped metrics at the monitoring system. The monitoring system may have been started in the container environment for or with the storage virtualization system.

Instructions 508, when executed, cause the processing resource 502 to receive the performance metrics. In some implementations, instructions 508 may cause the processing resource 502 to retrieve the performance metrics from the monitoring system via, e.g., an API call or other interface means. As described above, the retrieved performance metrics may be from the data path, the containerized application, or both.

Instructions 510, when executed, cause the processing resource 502 to modify the virtual PV based on an analysis of the performance metrics. In some implementations, the machine readable medium 504 includes instructions to perform the analysis, which includes identifying a storage class from among storage classes available in the container environment according to the performance metrics (that is, certain performance metrics or trends of metrics may trigger logic to search for a storage class having specific parameters, as described in examples above with respect to optimizer 253) and determining that the virtual PV is to be modified to include a new underlying storage volume provisioned using the identified storage class.

In some implementations, the machine readable medium 504 may include other instructions. For example, additional instructions may cause the processing resource 502 to determine to execute instructions 506, 508, 510 according to whether a storage class of the virtual PV (e.g., the virtual PV storage class) is of a dynamic type.

In the foregoing description, numerous details are set forth to provide an understanding of the subject matter disclosed herein. However, implementation may be practiced without some or all of these details, Other implementations may include modifications, combinations, and variations from the details discussed above. It is intended that the following claims cover such modifications and variations. 

1. A non-transitory machine readable medium storing instructions for a policy engine of a storage virtualization system in a container environment, the instructions, when executed, causing a processing resource to: identify, from among a plurality of application data store profiles that each includes storage parameters preconfigured for a respective application type, an application data store profile based on an application manifest of a containerized application to which a virtual persistent volume is allocated, wherein the virtual persistent volume is composed by a data path of the storage virtualization system from at least a first underlying storage volume, and the identified application data store profile indicates performance metrics relevant to optimizing the virtual persistent volume; receive values of the performance metrics collected by a monitoring system based on the indication of the performance metrics by the identified application data store profile, the performance metrics related to usage of the virtual persistent volume by the containerized application; and modify the virtual persistent volume based on an analysis of the performance metrics, the modifying of the virtual persistent volume comprising selecting, based on different storage profiles for respective different types of storage, a given storage profile of the different storage profiles based on the analysis of the performance metrics, and provisioning a second underlying storage volume using the given storage profile to include in the virtual persistent volume.
 2. The non-transitory machine readable medium of claim 1, wherein prior to the modification of the virtual persistent volume, the virtual persistent volume is composed of the first underlying storage volume and a third underlying storage volume, wherein a combination of a parameter of a first storage profile for the first underlying storage volume and a parameter of a second storage profile for the third underlying storage volume fulfills a parameter for a storage class of the virtual persistent volume, and wherein the different storage profiles comprise the first and second storage profiles.
 3. The non-transitory machine readable medium of claim 1, wherein the performance metrics are storage performance metrics of the containerized application.
 4. The non-transitory machine readable medium of claim 1, wherein the performance metrics include first storage performance metrics of the data path related to operations for the virtual persistent volume and second storage performance metrics of the containerized application.
 5. The non-transitory machine readable medium of claim 1, wherein the instructions, when executed, cause the processing resource to: determine whether a storage class of the virtual persistent volume is of a dynamic type; and in response to determining that the storage class of the virtual persistent volume is of the dynamic type, performing the receiving of the values of the performance metrics and the modifying of the virtual persistent volume.
 6. The non-transitory machine readable medium of claim 1, wherein the selecting of the given storage profile based on the analysis of the performance metrics includes determining that the given storage profile is better suited than another storage profile of the different storage profiles for how the containerized application is using the virtual persistent volume.
 7. The non-transitory machine readable medium of claim 3, wherein the storage performance metrics include input/output per second and latency.
 8. A method comprising: identifying, by a storage virtualization system comprising a hardware processor, an application data store profile from among a plurality of application data store profiles that each includes storage parameters preconfigured for a respective application type, based on an application manifest of a containerized application to which a virtual persistent volume is allocated, wherein the virtual persistent volume is composed by a data path of the storage virtualization system from at least a first underlying storage volume, and the identified application data store profile indicates performance metrics relevant to optimizing the virtual persistent volume; receiving, by the storage virtualization system, values of the performance metrics collected by a monitoring system based on the indication of the performance metrics by the identified application data store profile, the performance metrics related to usage of the virtual persistent volume by the containerized application; and modifying, by the storage virtualization system, a composition of the virtual persistent volume based on an analysis of the performance metrics, the modifying of the composition of the virtual persistent volume comprising selecting, based on different storage profiles for respective different types of storage, a given storage profile of the different storage profiles based on the analysis of the performance metrics, and provisioning a second underlying volume using the given storage profile to include in the virtual persistent volume.
 9. The method of claim 8, wherein prior to the modification of the virtual persistent volume, the virtual persistent volume is composed of the first underlying storage volume and a third underlying storage volume, wherein a combination of a parameter of a first storage profile for the first underlying storage volume and a parameter of a second storage profile for the third underlying storage volume fulfills a parameter for a storage class of the virtual persistent volume, and wherein the different storage profiles comprise the first and second storage profiles.
 10. The method of claim 8, wherein the values of the performance metrics indicate that input/output operations directed to the virtual persistent volume comprise more read operations than write operations, and wherein the selecting of the given storage profile comprises selecting a storage profile that is more favorable for read operations than write operations.
 11. The method of claim 8, comprising: determining, by the monitoring system based on the identified application data store profile, the performance metrics that are relevant to optimizing the virtual persistent volume; and collecting the values of the performance metrics based on the determination by the monitoring system.
 12. The method of claim 8, further comprising: controlling whether to perform the receiving and the modifying based on whether a storage class of the virtual persistent volume is of a dynamic type.
 13. The method of claim 8, wherein the selecting of the given storage profile based on the analysis of the performance metrics includes determining that the given storage profile is better suited than another storage profile of the different storage profiles for how the containerized application is using the virtual persistent volume.
 14. The method of claim 8, wherein the storage performance metrics include input/output per second and latency.
 15. A system comprising: a processing resource; and a non-transitory machine readable medium storing instructions for a storage virtualization system that, when executed, cause the processing resource to: identify, from among a plurality of application data store profiles that each includes storage parameters preconfigured for a respective application type, an application data store profile based on an application manifest of a containerized application to which a virtual persistent volume is allocated, wherein the virtual persistent volume is composed by a data path of the storage virtualization system from at least a first underlying storage volume, and the identified application data store profile indicates performance metrics relevant to optimizing the virtual persistent volume; receive values of the performance metrics collected by a monitoring system based on the indication of the performance metrics by the identified application data store profile, the performance metrics related to usage of the virtual persistent volume by the containerized application; and modify the virtual persistent volume based on an analysis of the performance metrics, the modifying of the virtual persistent volume comprising selecting, based on different storage profiles for respective different types of storage, a given storage profile of the different storage profiles based on the analysis of the performance metrics, and provisioning a second underlying volume using the given storage profile to include in the virtual persistent volume.
 16. The system of claim 15, wherein the performance metrics are storage performance metrics of the data path for the virtual persistent volume and not other virtual persistent volumes, and the storage performance metrics include input/output per second and latency.
 17. The system of claim 15, wherein the different types of storage comprise a local storage, a remote storage, and a virtualized storage.
 18. The system of claim 15, wherein prior to the modification of the virtual persistent volume, the virtual persistent volume is composed of the first underlying storage volume and a third underlying storage volume, wherein a combination of a parameter of a first storage profile for the first underlying storage volume and a parameter of a second storage profile for the third underlying storage volume fulfills a parameter for a storage class of the virtual persistent volume, and wherein the different storage profiles comprise the first and second storage profiles.
 19. The system of claim 15, wherein the selecting of the given storage profile based on the analysis of the performance metrics includes determining that the given storage profile is better suited than another storage profile of the different storage profiles for how the containerized application is using the virtual persistent volume.
 20. The system of claim 15, wherein the values of the performance metrics indicate that input/output operations directed to the virtual persistent volume comprise more read operations than write operations, and wherein the selecting of the given storage profile comprises selecting a storage profile that is more favorable for read operations than write operations. 